Remembrance Day is a day to remember the terrible cost of war, and a day to honour those who paid the cost, but it needs to be more than that. To give it its fullest, most enduring, meaning, it must also be a day to commit ourselves, individually and as a nation, to the elimination of war, to that peace in our time that was the end vision of those who went to war.

      I have, as I am sure many of you have, seen some of the graveyards in the north of France, the crosses row by row, the inscriptions "Known only to God", the walls with hundreds, thousands, of names of those who have no known grave. 13,000 young New Zealanders died on the Western Front, 35,000 were wounded; many, many more than at Gallipoli, although perhaps to greater purposes. I have had the privilege, too, of standing in the silent park on the beach at Anzac Cove on Anzac Day, and then of travelling around that peninsula and seeing the graveyards and the memorials there. Two particularly stand out in memory. One is a sculpture of an actual event, when a Turkish soldier, waving a white handkerchief, climbed out of the trenches into no-man's land, picked up a grievously wounded English soldier who was lying there, carried him to the British lines, and laid him down gently within reach of his comrades.

      The other bears the words of Kemal Ataturk, the victor at Gallipoli. What he said may well be familiar to you: "Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us, where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent your sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives in this land, they have become our sons as well."

      This year has been designated by the United Nations as International Year for the Culture of Peace. That word culture is an interesting choice. Perhaps we are to understand it in two of its meanings. It can mean a generally pervading set of values and beliefs, of attitudes and practices, or it can have the sense of "cultivate," "nurture." The second really leads to the first, and so this is a year in which we are all challenged to nurture in ourselves, and to inculcate in our communities, national and international, the attitudes, the practices, the ways of thinking and acting, that make for peace rather than conflict.

      That is so easy to say, but mighty difficult to achieve. But surely we must begin with ourselves, our own actions and reactions, for peace begins from within the individual, and it finds expression in the ways we individuals behave towards each other, in the ideals we hold and the principles by which we live, in the works of love and compassion we do. Individual attitudes of course lead to community attitudes, and so can bring about the elimination within our communities of the causes of conflict: injustice, excessive social or economic inequality, envy, distrust, pride.

      On the Commonwealth War memorial at Kohima, in Northeast India, perhaps the westernmost point of the war with Japan, and no doubt in other places too, there are these words:

      When you go home, tell them of us, and say,
      For your tomorrow we gave our today.

      On Remembrance Day, we can almost hear the voices of 30,000 New Zealanders reminding us of that. For that is the toll of our war dead, those whose names are inscribed on memorials in Asia and Europe and North Africa and the islands of the Pacific. And what they are saying to us is let your today, which is the tomorrow they were not to know, let it be full of promise, promise of peace and justice, a tomorrow free of bigotry and intolerance, of discrimination and denied opportunity, of all the evils that lead to dissension and then to conflict.

      The fulfilment of that promise requires a commitment from each one of us, for peace is not simply the absence of war, but a state of mind and a way of life that begin by being entirely personal, here at home, within each one of us. On this day of so many solemn memories, of pride and gratitude for what others have given for us, the most fitting, the most worthy, honour we can offer in their memory is to pledge ourselves to the same cause for which they gave their all.

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